This invention relates to a drinking cup storage and feeding device, for use in an automatic vending machine which stores therein plural kinds of drinking cups, such as large-volume cups for use exclusively for cold drinks and small-volume cups for use exclusively for hot drinks, and which picks out a kind of cup according to a type of drink selected by a purchaser and feeds it toward a vending stage.
Recently, in order to provide different types of drink goods in a small vending machine installation area, machines have appeared which can serve both cold drinks and hot drinks. These machines effectively combine into one machine, a conventional cold drink vending machine using soda syrup, for example and a conventional hot drink vending machine using coffee or cocoa powder raw material, for example. In such a machine, since a delivered quantity of hot drinks differs from the delivery quantity of the cold drink, it has been necessary to store two different kinds of cups having different volumes, and to provide the proper cup to the vending stage according to a purchaser's selection.
To this end, a conventional type automatic vending machine has been equipped with two complete separate cup feeding devices for cold drinks and for hot drinks, respectively. However, depending on the particular season, the proportion of hot drinks sold varies remarkably from that of cold drinks, with a higher demand for the cold drinks in the summer season, and a higher demand for hot drinks in the winter season. Accordingly, it has been necessary to provide cup feeding devices for both hot drinks and cold drinks in a conventional machine with a large enough cup storage capacity for cold and hot drinks to satisfy the demands in both the summer and winter seasons. However, the turnover rate of hot drink cups in the summer season, and of cold drink cups in the winter season is very small due to the variation in the demand. Consequently, a conventional vending machine having two complete, independent cup feeding devices cannot be utilized effectively at the same time since one of the cup feeding devices is very poor in its working ratio and occupies a large space in the machine, while the other cup feeding device requires frequent cup replacement by an operator. If the separate cup storage capacity of each cup feeding device is enlarged, the space in the machine occupied by the cup feeding device would become very large and require enlargement of the cabinet, thus leading to place restrictions in vending machine installation areas.